Luigi Russo (1943, 1944-1948)
A literary critic, Russo returned to the directorship of the Scuola Normale in 1944 at the behest of the allied military government, after having been its director in the first months of the previous year.
He had to deal with the difficult years of the immediate post-war period, and a financial crisis that also threatened the existence of the Scuola Normale: while seeking new sources of funding, he reduced the number of Normalisti to just over 50, and had 70 study places assigned to war veterans, partisans and civil deportees to Germany.
The Minister of Education, the Christian Democrat Gonella, after a bitter dispute over the length of his mandate, removed him from the post of director in 1948.
The incident coincided with the candidacy of Luigi Russo as an independent in the lists of the Italian Communist Party, in Sicily, in the political elections of 1948: the case of the removal of the Director of the Scuola Normale was aired in Parliament.
Normalisti of Russo's tenure included the writer Pietro Citati, the mathematician Aldo Andreotti, and the Italianist Luigi Blasucci.